Totally not about Meticulous Collection

I am seeing two sides to this coming into focus, and I think I agree with both.

On the one hand, as I originally said, I find it insulting that an act of creative skill that makes a finished and useful item out of raw materials receives no recognition of a monetary nature when sold. I believe such recognition is needed. I see support for that, and I appreciate it.

On the other, I see the worry that setting vendor prices to pay too much for finished goods will hurt the player economy. I do understand that, and appreciate the concern. The player economy is the goal, and it should always be supported, not undermined, by NPC pricing.

I think these two can come together at a middle ground, where the NPCs DO pay for finished goods, but not nearly as much as players would. I feel that this is important, and worth hoping for, for two reasons. First, because keeping the NPC rates below what players would pay encourages sale to players whenever possible. We don't want those who are able to gather, loot, or craft valuable things selling them to NPC vendors when there are players waiting to buy it. We want the player market to win whenever there is competition. Secondly, because players will not always buy what crafters make. When the market gluts with crafters all looking to undercut one another to make a sale, and no player is buying, the NPC vendors will be the minimum price point. So that crafting will be worth doing whether what you make is in demand or not. This is vital because at many stages of a crafters growth, xp from crafting tasks will be producing items that nobody wants, materials for crafting items not in demand, or finished items that just aren't as good as a comparably available item. Those trash products form naturally via normal market pressures, in the real world these pressures and natural processes result in substandard goods being sold to poorer markets, and people seeking excessive training to always be making the best of the best results. We know these things as 99c stores and third world countries, as apprenticeships and college. The goods get sold en masse, not for huge profits but for profits nonetheless, and vast investments are made for each student who hopes to fast forward to mastery of his or her craft.

Well, the player market will never have a third world, or even second world component. As I pointed out above, players will level and raise their skills, and their ability to harvest resources. They will avoid paying for housing, and how can the game hope to be fun, imposing all the frailties of daily life upon them? We play these games to ESCAPE from worlds where we must pay our rent, buy our groceries, and worry about temperature, air conditioning, humidity, and keeping the lights on late at night. So those conveniences, creature comforts, and daily expenses will be avoided by the very nature of the Avatar. They will all rise up to become the first world market, consuming only the best, and paying top dollar for it.

Thus, the NPCs become vital consumers of substandard goods. The players become top end consumers of premium goods. A crafter's life will take him or her through a progression, paying for minor components to make primitive, early skill gear. Progressing beyond that to be a refiner of other's goods, making what is needed by those who are above them. And finally, as they rise to true mastery, crafting the awesome masterworks that feed that elite player market, consuming the products of other, lesser crafters.

Of course, it won't work like that for everyone, there will be those who want to gather and craft everything themselves, and resent even having to pay NPCs for things like coal, or wax. There will be those who never seem to figure out what the market wants, and thus are constantly making goods that just WILL NOT sell. To settle the disruptions such people will cause, and experience, we need the basement level of the NPCs, and I believe that we need that basement level to be at a point where people can make a basic profit from all that hard work.

I do also see another viewpoint rearing it's head, yet again. The idea that we should hold comment because the system is not yet balanced, not yet finished, not yet polished. News flash: we comment BECAUSE it is not yet finished. Once again, this is not a forum for whining about the game, it is crowdsourcing the very function and form of the game from those who contributed money to its creation. We all paid to be here, and the devs specifically asked for our feedback. When we notice something broken, it is not asked of us that we fix it, but nor is it appropriate that we ignore it in the expectation that someone else will deal with it. We comment, and discuss, so that the devs can see what we found, and how we think it might be improved. That's why we're here.

 

If player economy is the purpose, then the public vendor policy needs to be fixed. As I understand it, if my item does not sell, the vendor auto sells it to NPCs for its "item value". I have zero incentive to sell my Crit Leather chest with Fustian strap and Const. Bindings on the public vendor if my 5k auction fails and he auto sells it to the NPC's and gives me a whopping 42 gold. Right now, I create nothing for the player economy. I go out for a few hours, mine/skin/log everything. ALL animal hides get vendored, all the metal gets stored in the form of rare ingots ( but never crafted since flaming swords are too risky to put up on the public vendor ), and all logging mats get either sold or converted into bark bread and sold to vendors. Armor in this game is currently not a fungible good. You only need one set, so you just save up for the best set and then you are basically finished. You only need gold to repair it. Public vendors and private vendors serve little purpose and will continue to be under-utilized until you put a system of meaningful item loss. This is likely a known issue and will be addressed soon no doubt.

Side Note:

If you want to promote economy, then the "auction house" needs a bit of a rework. The localized system is great, creating micro-economies. However you need to create dependencies between the micro economies in order to promote trade. If Owl's head is a great place to find "XXXX" and the crafters in Brittany are always complaining about a lack of XXXX, then this will spur trade caravans. Of course, the important corrolary to this lien of thinking is that the trade route needs to be hazardous with a chance to lose said item XXXX on the way.

 

@Frammshamm
You can pull your item from the Public Vendor at any time.
So if it hasn't sold for a couple of days, just pull it and put it back in to renew the timer.
I do that all the time.
(I usually also set my alarm for 5 days after I put something up so I don't forget).

Side note
Things aren't finished. Some resources will be more abundant in certain regions or even exclusive to a specific region. Etc.

 

This is an issue on which we very much agree. I with the thread had a better title so that people could see what this was really about. I would love crafters in the community to work on a shared Google Spreadsheet.

I'm at work so the values I put in here are probably wrong, but it is a proof of concept that people can put in with correct values.

Type in the values of raw goods. Then for any crafted good, the formula I'm using for the minimum value it should have is the value of the combined components plus 10%.

For example, an Animal Hide has a value of 10, and a Curing Salt has a value of 2. The recipe calls for 4 Animal Hides and 1 Curing Salt, but produces 2 Leather. So an individual piece of Leather should be =((10*2)+(2/2))*1.1

With the sheet the formula can link to the values of the other items, so as each item is updated it will affect everything else. So now you can put in the expected value of a Yard of Leather since we have an expected value of a single piece of Leather.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y7W8KZarVJmQVXGi3Ae_YS1TTZUkYNqbSy2a11qnoYA/edit?usp=sharing

 

Only problem I have with the spreadsheet is the NPC value of the item fluctuates every so often. Like you have animal hide as 10, the npc vendor was offering 6 to me when I was looking at a particular vendor. Small difference but still, might add up when the bulk builds up?

 

We'll use the value item that shows in your inventory and not what a vendor pays since that fluctuates. All we care about is getting correct base values.

 

While I understand the principle that Chris and the team are aiming for with the NPC vendors, I still can't see how the math behind it works. The system as described revolves around a group of focused crafters and focused adventures (hybrids will exist, but as they aren't really participating in the economy, we can ignore them). The idea is that the a subset of the adventurers and crafters will collect raw materials, sell them to the crafters, who will convert the material (eventually) into stuff that crafters and adventures want and need and are willing to pay for. The problem is that crafting appears to be pretty popular, and under any reasonable estimate of the ratio of crafters to adventures, the actual output of the crafters will far exceed what is required. Since the overflow gets sold to NPC vendors at a loss, or worse, held as inventory, crafters will inevitably run out of money toppling the system. I haven't seen any real mechanism in game that would allow the devs to tweak this ratio without restricting play options which is a death sentence for a title without a large player base.

 

I hope that alongside a 'smelt' or reclaim button there is a 'make last' implemented too. That or being able to put in stacks of resources to make multiple items. Having to recipe list, craft, recipe list, craft is tedium to the max.

I hope we get some more drops or reduce the number of resources required to make items like ingots and such because it's extremely time consuming at the moment, and with the addition of crafting skills it's going to take eons to make anything if you're going to focus on crafting.

 

Doesn't that just give the items more value instead of "Hey I have 9999 of these epic hammers and sell them for 5 gold a piece"
I'm not really a crafter though so not my place to weigh in probably.

 

Just in case there is a misunderstanding here... Double clicking on the icon of a recipe will list that for you. So the tedium is
double click recipe icon > craft > double click recipe icon > craft.
Just in case, since I've seen some try to click the recipe text and thus miss it.

 

Yeah, that's what I was referring to. However I'd prefer if you didn't have to click each 50x to make 50 items over just putting a stack of 50 of each ingredient then hit craft once to get 50 output. Obviously you would only need 1 hammer/scissors/etc, but it would deal 50 points of loss to it's durability.

I get what you mean and I'm definitely behind making certain items time consuming to make them worth more, but at the moment it can take an individual massive amounts of time just to collect the resources to make a simple thing like a chair. As stated in posts above, the value of the resources collected used into the final product + time spent far outweighs the selling price of the created product. Everyone can buy a plate set for roughly 2000 gold tops at regular vendors, but a stack of 10 iron ingots costs triple that, and I understand why. It takes a distinctly large amount of time to amass 10 ingots.

Couple that with having to find nodes to collect, whilst simultaneously competing with others who camp spots for resources - that's where the tedium comes in. Everyone knows where all the nodes are as well, which doesn't help as there's no chance element to it. They can just run to the node, harvest it, leave the scene and run back to the exact same spots. Off the top of my head 1 wooden pole requires 6 lumber!!! In a real example of carpentry, you can lathe a pole out of one piece of wood. The only advantage to the current format falls for large groups pooling their resources. I'm down with making armor time consuming, but for things just to decorate with it seems like a bit of overkill.

 

If you look on the skill tree that is planned. So I'm holding my thumbs for R21, please please please....

 

Yeah this is a problem I agree but think I heard/read that this was going to get improved.
as for prices they should get better just by more people playing but probably needs a lot of refining as well
crafting is at such an early state though so I really haven't given it much thought, tried to make a pair of boots and was overwhelmed by the resources I needed but like I said I'm not a crafter so